With Comrades Like These…

Barack Obama demonstrated an unusual ability to be all things to all people (or most of them, anyway) during last year’s Presidential campaign. Now he’s exhibiting the same talent on the international stage. He is simultaneously being feted in Wahabbist Saudi Arabia and praised by Marxist Hugo Chavez, who hails Obama as a “comrade”:

During one of Chavez’s customary lectures on the “curse” of capitalism and the bonanzas of socialism, the Venezuelan leader made reference to GM’s bankruptcy filing, which is expected to give the U.S. government a 60 percent stake in the 100-year-old former symbol of American might.

“Hey, Obama has just nationalized nothing more and nothing less than General Motors. Comrade Obama! Fidel, careful or we are going to end up to his right,” Chavez joked on a live television broadcast.

One could view this as a microcosm of the seemingly-incongruous confluence between the Left and radical Islam that occurred in recent years. There is a simpler explanation, however: a great many foreign leaders have an interest in a weakened America, and all of them seem quite fond of President Obama.